by Aimee Bender
I left a few baits: I cleared my nightstand of all things, so that it was ready for a deposit. I bought a lobster soup with my own allowance, which made my mother shriek, but I assured her I’d bought it and I’d even saved the receipt to prove it. I brought it out of my bedroom, and she stared at the curling white paper and then looked at me, in the way she rarely did, eye to eye.
Are you okay, Lisa? she said. Ten-year-olds don’t usually save receipts.
I’m trying to trap a ghost, I said.
Would you like to go to the mall? she asked. Her eyes were tired. She looked pretty with tired eyes, so I didn’t mind so much.
We went to the nearest mall, over in Cerritos, which had been built twenty years ago and was ugly. I liked that about it. It was like a relative nobody liked but everybody still had to be related to anyway. We went to the kids’ store and she bought me two shirts, one orange, one red, and then I got very attached to a particular cap with an octopus on the cap part, and I felt if I left it in the store I might dissolve. I didn’t have much allowance left due to the spenditure of the lobster soup, and so I asked my mom as nicely as I could if I could have an advance and get the octopus cap because I loved it very much.
That? She was holding the store bag and trying to stop the salesperson from talking to her by staring out the door. Thanks, she was saying, thanks, thanks.
I love it, I said, putting it on my head. It was too big. I couldn’t see well underneath it.
Please? I said.
We just got you two new shirts, she said. Do you really need a cap?
It’s good for skin cancer, I said. Of the face.
She laughed. She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her job trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad’s job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn’t think of how. That afternoon, I didn’t want to bother her more, but I wasn’t certain I could leave the store with that cap still in it. If someone else bought it, I might tear in two.
I will pay you back, I said. I swear. Or we can exchange it for one of the shirts?
She got me the cap because I hardly ever asked for much, and at home I slept with it on, and wore my new orange shirt to school and back, and I was ready to charge ahead into my afternoon activities when I noticed the octopus cap on my dresser.
I thought it was the one on my head, except then I realized that that one was already on my head. So this had to be a new one? I took the one on my head off and held them both side by side. Two octopus caps. I had two now. One, two. They were both exactly the same, but I kept saying right hand, right hand, in my head, so I’d remember which one I’d bought, because that was the one I wanted. I didn’t want another octopus cap. It was about this particular right-hand octopus cap; that was the one I had fallen in love with. Somehow, it made me feel so sad, to have two. So sad I thought I couldn’t stand it.
I took the new one, left hand, to the trash, but then I thought my mom might see it and get mad that I’d thrown out the new cap she had especially bought for me, so I put the one I loved on my head and put the one I hated in the closet, behind several old sweatshirts. I went out to play wearing the first one. I played kickball with Dot Meyers next door, but she kicks cock-eyed and it was hard to see out of the cap, and when I went inside I scrounged in the closet for the second cap and it fit. That’s what was so sad. It was the right size, and I put it on, and it was better. I put them both on, one after the other, because at least by size now I could tell which was which, but it was just plain true that the one I loved did not fit and kept falling off and the one they brought did fit and looked better. Dot Meyers thought I looked dumb in a bad-fitting cap, but she’s dumb anyway and can’t spell America right.
I saw Hannah kissing a boy I’d never seen before, outside our house, in the bushes.
That night, I put a bunch of stuff in Hannah’s bedroom to freak her out, but she immediately recognized it all as mine, so it just wasn’t the same.
I wore the good new cap to school.
I ate the lobster soup. I liked it. It had a neat texture. I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got. I liked the remaining wild rice one that hadn’t made it into the Halloween bag; it was so hearty and different. I used the cow cup I’d salvaged from the trash, and the truth was, I liked the cow holding a balloon; it was cute. When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.
Mom came home from taking a class called Learning How to Focus Your Mind, and she seemed kind of focused, more than usual at least, and she sat with Grandma on the sofa and talked about childhood.
After a while I sat with them. There’s nothing to do after homework and TV and creaming Dot Meyers.
You were a quiet child, said Grandma.
What did I like to do? asked Mom.
You liked to go with me to the store, said Grandma.
What else? asked Mom.
You liked to stir the batter, said Grandma.
What else?
I don’t know, said Grandma. You liked to read.
Even as they were talking, I saw it happen on the dining room table. Saw it as they were talking, but it wasn’t like an invisible hand. Just one second there was a blank table, and I blinked, and then there was a gift on the table, a red-wrapped gift with a yellow bow. It was in a box, and I went to it and sat at the table. I knew it was for me. I didn’t need to tell them, plus they were talking a lot, plus Dad was at work, plus Hannah was out kissing.
It had no card, but it was really good wrapping, with those clean-cut triangular corners, and I opened it up and inside was a toy I had broken long ago. Actually, I hadn’t broken it; Hannah had. It was a mouse, made of glass, and Hannah had borrowed it without asking and dropped it in the toilet by accident—so she said—and broken off the red ball nose. I had been so mad at her I hadn’t spoken to her for a week and I’d made a rule that she couldn’t come in my room ever again and I asked Mom for a door lock, but she didn’t think I really meant it so I got one myself, at the hardware store, with a key, with money from my birthday, but I couldn’t figure out how to put it on. Here was the mouse, with its nose.
What was next? Grandma?
Thanks? I said, to the air.
I took the mouse and put it on the shelf it used to be on, next to the mouse that had no nose, retrieved from the toilet. The mouse without the nose looked pathetic but a little charming, and the mouse with the nose? Well. It had never been in the toilet.
When Hannah came home, I showed her. Mom’s taking a new class, I said. That’s good, she said. Her face was flushed. She seemed relieved, once she paid attention, that the new mouse had arrived. Sorry about the toilet thing, she said, for the fiftieth time. It’s cute, she said, patting the new one.
Let’s flush it down the toilet, I said.
What?
My eyes were pleading. I could feel them, pleading.
Please, Hannah.
Hang on, she said. She went to the bathroom and splashed her face and spent a minute in there with her crushiness, and then opened up. I brought both mice in.
Both, I said, the old and the new.
Fine, she said. Whatever.
How’d you do it?
I just dropped it in, she said.
On purpose?
Yeah.
I didn’t blame her. Right now, it seemed like these mice were just made for the toilet. I sat next to her on the edge of the bathtub, and dropped in the new guy. He floated around in the clean white toilet water.
Flush away, said Hannah, her eyes all shiny.
I flushed. He bobbed around and almost went down but didn’t. He was slightly too big. The toilet almost overflowed. But still—the nose.
That’s just what I did, she said. She was putting on lip gloss and smacking at herself in the mirror.
I picked up the wet new mouse, and broke his nose
right off. It took some pressure, me holding him good in one hand and then snapping it off. You can ruin anything if you focus at it. There, I said.
I put both mice in the trash, and washed my hands. Hannah broke up with her boyfriend a few weeks later because he’d started calling her honey, and I got picked for the kickball team, and we didn’t get any more gifts. Not for years.
Mom found some work downtown as a filing clerk, and Dad almost got that promotion. Hannah went to college nearby but she lived at home because of the price of rent. Grandma got older and eventually died.
When I was about to graduate high school, I did notice a packet of yellow curry in the pantry while I was rummaging around, looking for a snack. It was in a plastic yellow envelope that just said Curry on it in red letters. I asked my mom if she’d bought it, and she said no. Hannah? No. Dad? No. I don’t like curry, I said out loud, although I’d never tried it. As an afterthought, I brought it with me to college, where I had a scholarship, so I was the first one to leave home, it turned out, and it sat in the cupboard in the dorm for four years, alongside the oregano and the salt and my roommate’s birth control pills. I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the noxious carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.
The Devourings
The ogre’s wife was a good woman. She was not an ogre, but she was ugly, by human standards, and she had married the ogre because he was strong and productive, and together they had made six small ogre children. The children all took after their father. She had not expected otherwise—one look at his giant teeth, height, and huge features, and she knew his genes had to be dominant.
Years earlier, she had left her own village by choice, traveling up and over the green and rising hills in search of a life for herself, and when she had met the ogre in the tavern, him stretched along the entire side wall, his voice scratched from cigar smoke, she thought she might give the alternate world a chance. Everyone in her hometown knew of the ogres, living up on Cloud Hill like that. With their magical boots, and that hen.
With also, she wondered, a range of appetites? Later that night, at his home, the ogre had been surprised at her willingness to take off her clothes, since he’d been rumored to eat people for dinner. As she unlaced her blouse, he touched fingertips to her trembling bare shoulders and explained in his low gravel that he only ate human beings he did not know. I know your name now, he murmured. I know your travels. You’re safe. Her eyes were closed, and when she revealed her breasts, he sighed. They were sculpted by a different artist, he whispered to her, with a subtler tool. His desire was too much for her at first, overwhelming, but she soon grew to love him and his body, its giant harshness, its gentle gruffness with her. Next to him, she felt herself so delicate. At school, she had been the roughest-skinned, the one with the drooping features, the one no one could ever imagine that way, in a bed. She did not care about not being pretty, but she wanted to be seen as a future woman, as one who could participate, and no high-school boy could take that leap. The ogre, however, found her nothing short of revelatory, and the first time he entered her, he shouted with joy.
One evening, after many years of contented marriage, the children tucked in their bed, asleep, snoring faintly, wearing hammered gold crowns with their nightshirts because their father wanted them to feel like royal ogres in their dreams, a human girl and her siblings knocked on the door, frightened. They were lost, and the ogre was out at the tavern, and the ogre’s wife opened up, and there they were—a group of six live human kids, with bright hair and red felt hats and snapping eyes, reminding her so sweetly of her long-ago nieces and nephews. The ogre’s wife disliked firmly only one aspect of her husband: his interest in eating the children of humans. It could’ve been me! she told him once in bed while he twirled and twisted her hair over his fingers. She could not bear to turn the children out into the ogre-filled night, so she hustled them inside and in a fierce whisper told them they could hide in the same giant bed as her own children, but not to make a sound, not a peep!
When the ogre came home, late, he smelled them, of course; how could she have imagined he would not smell them? She was half-asleep, twisted in the sheets, and hoped desperately that he would just crash out on the sofa in drunkenness. What she did not know was that, earlier in the night, the smart little girl leader of the human group had swapped their six red felt hats with the six golden crowns on the heads of the deep-sleeping ogre children, and when the ogre cackled hungrily, bumbling around the house, hunting for the source of the scent, he, of poor eyesight, of booziness, of delirium, ended up eating all his own children due to the swapping of those hats.
In the early morning, the human children ran off terrified, giggling.
We skip ahead five years, because five years were full of nothing but searing pain and tears. Five years of lying on the bed unable to move, slogging up to do the basic functioning needed to hold things together, then back to bed. Five years of scathing bitterness at ogres, and also at humans, at where she came from, and the worry that had led her to open the door; I should’ve let him eat them first thing! she said, weeping into the down of her pillow, though she felt sick anytime she had even gotten the hint that her husband had eaten a child. But her own! There were two that she mourned the most, much as she hated to admit it to herself, but she had loved Lorraine and Stillford best, the two most-complex-looking ogre faces, who had emerged post-utero like gnarled wood knots, and who had turned out to be all sweetness in nature. How they had loved their human mother. They nestled on her lap and nudged their big heads into her shoulders. They were gentle during the breastfeeding, unlike their siblings. Ogres grew teeth early, and she had to stop feeding most of them or they would’ve ripped off her nipple, truly. She, many times, ran to the bathroom with blood streaming from her breasts from a careless slash, a little ogre child happily lapping up the red drops on the sofa. To those she gave formula. But she was too softhearted to decide for them all; for each new child she risked her breast, and Lorraine and Stillford had been different, angled their teeth just so and suckled like little human babies, and perhaps held within their selves some of her human genes that knew not to tear at the gentleness offered. Now they were dead, digested in the system of their father, who had been so angry he split a bone out of his neck while overclenching his jaw and had to go to the hospital, where he broke four beds and injured a nurse. He was angrier than ever these days, and their marriage and its focus and tenderness had faded. His favorite had been Lutter, the super-ogre demon child, who was so kinetic she rarely saw him still, and who had scraped the walls into shreds with his nails and twice tried to swallow his mother whole. She had let him train with her husband only, and why Lutter, even in his sleep, had let himself be eaten, could only have been due to the deep dreamy trust he felt of the smell of the mouth he was entering, a mouth he knew from its firm position over his shoulder, telling him instructions on how to rip through cartilage and sinew, and an inability, due to that core of trust, to imagine his fate could end this way.
After enough time had passed, she was able to get out of bed for hours at a time. She could go to town and engage in minutes of small talk. She could sit outside on the porch and watch leaves twist on the birch trees. She could read a short article in the newsletter. On this day, a day of change, she cleaned the house, top to floor, using swaths of cloth that grew dark with dirt and dust. She swept tumbleweeds of lint out the front door, and poured scrubbing detergent into all the sinks to scour the vast yellowing basins. At the market, she bought root vegetables by the dozen and chickens and sausages. She stuffed the chickens and made a stew and fed her husband, who came home ragged from his work climbing mountainsides to look for caves packed with jewels and gifts like the magical harp that that thi
ef Jack had stolen from his brother years ago.
We are pillaged, constantly, said the ogre, laying his loot in a sparkling heap by the door. And they fear us?
He kissed her on the ear, and sat down to roll a cigar out of crisp brown paper and a fist-sized wad of tobacco.
Good stew, human, he said, after dinner.
Please don’t call me that, she said, for the hundredth time.
That’s right, he said, patting his belly. I’m sorry. Love that sausage, delicious. He lit the cigar and inhaled deeply.
She wiped the globs of leftover chicken off the dining room table with a sponge.
While he mumbled to himself, digesting, sleepy, she filled the pots with soap and water to soak, and ate a little bowl of the chicken stew behind the counter. She rarely ate at the same table as her husband anymore, as she now feared him during mealtimes, couldn’t stand to watch him slurp up animals with that vigor and those grinding, pointed teeth.
Husband, she said, putting her bowl aside. She walked out from behind the counter. I have decided I need to go on a trip, she said.
The ogre was finishing his fourth mug of wine. He liked the darkest wine, the red almost black.
Go where? he said, wiping his mouth. To see your family?
She shook her head. Her family lived below, in the people village, and last time she’d been home, before the devourings, everyone had lectured her on ogres and complicity and betrayal. She’d waved them off. He’s a good one, she had said. She had not dared show pictures of her children.
I’d like to see something pretty, she said. Maybe a lake?
There’s a river that’s supposed to be nice a few valleys over, he said, exhaling bracelets of smoke to the rafters.
Okay, she said. A river.
I could go with you, he said, turning a giant brown eye to hers. His eye like a pool hers could swim inside.
A mucky pool.
No, she told him. I need to do this alone.
